Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Some of you will have heard of link spam - but are unsure of what it is. Well ... I have an example on this very blog. As you will see, anyone can add a comment - but I have the setting so that all comments are emailed to me for 'vetting' so that I can reject unsuitable comments and release suitable ones onto the blog.

Below is one comment I received for moderation.

As you can see if you take a quick look at the blog entry on which the comment is added - the comment has nothing to do with the original entry from me. You will note also that that the 'comment' is full of links to a variety of services offered by this company. This is link spam. It hasn't worked on this occasion because I have not published it [and have marked it as spam] - however, many blogs are not moderated, and so 'comments' like this go live on a multitude of blogs, each with a link to the link-spamming organization's website.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

I have never flown with Ryanair before - but much has been written about the extra costs added to the basic price featured on the budget airline's website ... and here's my contribution after booking a flight to Gdansk. Good website usability - or should I say 'moral' website usability - offers extras as a 'click-to-add' offering. Less moral businesses make users 'click-to-delete' extras that are added by default. So I was not surprised when Ryanair added insurance by default with a message saying that "If you are already insured you can select 'don't cover me' in the drop down box" [I'll not be so picky as to point out that a compound adjective should have a dash ie drop-down box - oh, alright, I will]

But what drop-down box? The only one I could see on the page was the one for 'Passenger 1' - and it had United Kingdom showing, so I assumed it was for the nationality of the passenger. But I did click on it, and it was - I thought - just a list of nationalities in alphabetical order. Eventually, I clicked on it and scrolled down ... and found the 'don't cover me' option stuck in there out of alphabetical order.

OK, so maybe I was being a bit thick - but consider my background, surely I would not be the only person to be confused by this ... and ultimately, of course, a cynic like me might think the objective was to have customers just say "sod it, I'll just pay for the insurance".

when you’re inside the bottle, you can’t read the label ... so get outside the bottle

This blog is simply a marketer’s view of the good, the bad and the ugly of Internet marketing that I come across in my daily life. I do not go looking for them - they come to me [in the case of emails, literally].

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If you find this stuff even remotely interesting, take a look at more of my thoughts on this whole Internet marketing malarkey on my web site - www.alancharlesworth.eu

please note:

All of the comments on these pages were accurate at the time of writing. Obviously, some of the 'iffy' practices may have been put right since - maybe because someone at the organization read this blog?